With a view plan to compete with the 127-plus million viewers in the US last year, Super Bowl LX yesterday reinforced the event’s unparalleled power to concentrate the attention of the masses as the Seahawks and Patriots took the field and Bad Bunny gave a halftime performance designed to dominate the global conversation. Brands pay NBCUniversal up to $10 million for just 30 seconds of air time — the most expensive advertising real estate in the world. Approximately 40 percent of advertisers are first-time Super Bowl participants, highlighting how aggressively companies are seeking to see the culture — though many organizations still struggle to translate cultural moments into sustained growth.

Within hours, those investments provided exactly what marketers had hoped for: attention, buzz, and viral engagement.

For most companies, however, the days following the Super Bowl reveal a predictable reality. Cultural momentum will be lost. The increase in sales proved to be temporary. Leadership teams are left questioning why the world’s largest marketing phase rarely produces sustainable growth.

The answer has little to do with creative quality or breadth of media reach. This reflects a deeper structural problem within the business itself. Most companies have not developed the capabilities needed to transform cultural relevance into strong economic value.

For decades, companies believed that growth followed a predictable formula: awareness, consideration, conversion. The marketing funnel makes markets – and consumers – feel in control. That time is over.

The infrastructure that supports it – cookies, stable audiences, and linear media consumption – is crumbling. Attention is now divided between creators, platforms, communities, and algorithms. Personalization technologies distribute content with incredible precision but rarely create shared and sustained demand at scale.

At the same time, fashion cycles accelerate rapidly, changing how consumers engage with brands. They join in from nowhere, emerge unpredictably, and return only when meaning – not messaging – pulls them back. Replacing the marketing funnel is something that executives still underestimate: culture.

Culture is no longer a marketing input. It becomes the operating system for growth.

Consider where the investment is already operating. A November 2025 IAB study projects advertising spending in the US creator-economy will reach $37 billion this year — growing nearly four times faster than total media spending. Nearly half of major brands now treat creator partnerships as a mandatory channel rather than an experiment.

This shift reflects a deeper truth. Consumer demand is increasingly shaped within cultural ecosystems that force participation. A tunnel walk during a major sporting event can sell products in real time. A streaming franchise that combines brands with characters, storylines, and social conversations can reset brand relevance overnight. A culturally savvy creator can be more than a multimillion-dollar media buy. The effect is already visible. New Balance’s continued innovation – fueled by its integration across sports, streetwear, and creator culture – has helped grow the company to a nearly $8 billion global business, nearly doubling revenue since 2020 while dramatically increasing relevance to Gen Z, illustrating how an institutionalized cultural strategy can translate directly into continued gains in share of market.

The Super Bowl represents the ultimate test of this truth. It remains the largest stage of American commercial culture. But it also exposes a growing capability gap. Most companies treat cultural moments as campaigns. Today’s winning companies treat culture as a core business competency. Brands like New Balance, American Eagle, gup Inc., SephoraLiquid Death, and Spotify don’t rely on sporadic cultural hits. They design their organizations to consistently sense cultural signals, create culturally transformative experiences, measure impact in real time, and measure demand across product, commerce, and community ecosystems.

This difference is fast becoming one of the most consequential competitive fault lines in modern markets. Over the past two decades, most corporate transformation efforts have focused heavily on cost efficiency, scale-based mergers and acquisitions, and digital modernization. These initiatives often improve productivity and shareholder returns but leave organizations structurally unprepared for markets shaped by divided attention, hyper-accelerated fashion cycles, and non-linear demand generation.

Too many companies remain stuck optimizing outdated growth systems designed for stability, predictability, and media scale rather than relevance, agility, and cultural fluency. This disconnect explains why culture has become a priority at the CEO level – and why incumbents with strong legacies have a harder time translating brand awareness into continued growth.

Winning companies redesign their operating models around culture as a strategic growth engine. They collapse into silos between storytelling and performance, brand and commerce, product execution and go-to-market, and between insight and action. Decision-making cycles are getting shorter. Teams are organized around fandoms, creators, and cultural moments rather than rigid functional structures or media channels. Data and analytics track cultural signals alongside traditional performance metrics. Some companies are even elevating entertainment culture and leadership to the C-suite, showing how important these capabilities are to growth.

Culture burns attention. Content sparks engagement. Creators accelerate credibility. Commerce proves the relevance. Communities amplify meaning – and the cycle repeats. This is the new growth engine. This is what I call the Culture Flywheel — where growth compounds through feedback loops, not linear funnels.

Executives who dismiss culture as intangible or uncontrollable are misreading how markets and consumers behave today. Cultural signals are among the strongest early indicators of future demand. But capturing and acting on those signals requires new capabilities, new ways of working across the enterprise, and often new partnerships.

Culture does not replace strategy. It changes how strategy is built and executed. Companies that institutionalize cultural relevance are more likely to gain sustained market share.

The irony is that cultural advantage has become harder – not easier – to replicate. Artificial intelligence is rapidly commoditizing content creation and distribution. What remains scarce is institutionalized cultural intelligence: the organizational ability to consistently interpret cultural signals and convert them into scalable business results.

These capabilities cannot be bought overnight or outsourced forever. They should be deliberately built into how companies operate. In a business environment where traditional competitive advantages are increasingly fragile, culture has emerged as one of the few strong drivers of business value.

The Super Bowl remains the most expensive megaphone in business. The real strategic question is which companies will have the cultural relevance – and commercial advantage – after the final whistle.

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